


Trust All The Years (You'll Wait To Find)

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Armistice [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Child Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Graphic Description, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Limbo, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 09:51:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14691678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: He’s forgotten someone, or maybe they’ve forgotten him.He’s waiting for something he must have wanted, once, even if he can’t remember what anymore.**Companion to This Man Who's Loved You (Your Whole Life)**





	Trust All The Years (You'll Wait To Find)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there darlings.
> 
> So, a QUITE IMPORTANT NOTE.
> 
> As you can see, this is part of my Armistice series. It has nothing whatsoever to do with my *other* story called Armistice, because that is officially old news. I’m rewriting it (whoop whoop!) and it’ll be fit for human consumption soon. Or at least, the prologue and chapter one will be. For now, here’s a oneshot, which will simultaneously be very helpful and very unhelpful for figuring out what brand of Arthur and Eames I’m cooking up for you this time.
> 
> Title comes from the Patrick Wolf song Armistice.
> 
> I actually adore you all. I hope you like it, it would be great to hear from you.
> 
> Yours faithfully, ever gratefully, LRCx

 

.

.

Arthur sits in the living room, rolling a red die over and over.

_six two one two four three six five two two one four three five one six two four five six four three_

It’s starting to read like code.

.

.

The boiler’s broken again.

The rust scabbed over the innards has been flaking into the pipes. The shower smells of metal and the water has a brown green tinge to it.

The house groans incessantly, those tummy rumbles of age and wear.

He should have sold this place years ago, when he could still get some money for its Georgian style and oak beam ceilings. It would be cheaper to demolish by now.

Treading lightly over the pine floor, avoiding the scuff marks he hasn’t revarnished yet, Arthur heads back to the basement, where the churning sound of the boiler is coming from. It smells of damp even from the stop of the stairs.

He descends with the same caution he used to show for his father’s sleeping form on the sofa, Saturday nights and Tuesday mornings and all the days between.

In the basement, the walls are lined with great old barrels stamped with the patent of his ancestors.

Whisky, he thinks, although that doesn’t sound right. Maybe it’s wine.

He’s never liked it down here. As a little boy visiting his grandparents, he’d scurry past the door that led down here, afraid of the gurgling monsters that slept in their wet wooden cages.

“Your grandfather breeds other men’s demons,” his mother used to say.

And Arthur, he believed her, because why wouldn’t he? She was good and true, while his grandfather was full of rattlesnake anger, passed onto his son through bottomless bottles and the fizzle of stubbed out cigarettes.

Now, he no longer hurries past the door on scampering feet, but he does avoid lingering among the looming barrels that remain, the fossils of a demonic legacy he shrugged off along with his last name.

The boiler room is at the back.

One hanging light casts trembling yellow beams over the room, which contains only the hissing boiler and a huge rack of shelves full of assorted items. Dried out paint cans, a jewellery box covered in white seashells, a case of fountain pens unused.

Arthur doesn’t dare look too closely at most of it, even though there’s probably some costly antiques hidden amidst the junk.

The boiler groans as he approaches it, hands raised nervously in surrender and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

He shuffles forward in half-steps, cringing as the boiler grunts again, determinedly not thinking about the scald scour burst of Jack Torrance’s fiery end at the mercy of the Overlook.

Arthur is good at fixing things, contrary to the belief of every single person he meets.

Apparently, wearing matching cufflinks and tie pins makes him too fancy for manual labour.

Still, there’s only so much he can do with limited materials and he’s running out of options with this godforsaken boiler. He’s flushed out the supply lines twice already, cobbled together a new heat exchanger and still it barely lasts a week.

He keeps meaning to call someone. It’s a stubborn mixture of pride and procrastination that has left him with only his own two hands to patch together this creased and wilting structure, which would have been considered a fixer-upper maybe ten years ago.

He can hear the water trickle, can smell it and taste it and feel its dampness in his skin. He can’t find the source.

There’s probably some spare valves on one of the shelves behind him.

Sweat sucks against his brow and neck. The feeble light is giving him a headache.

He wants some peace, wants a hot shower and coffee that doesn’t taste of iron.

Arthur rummages through the bottom shelf, full of frayed cables and yarns of wool and a box of blanks half empty, the holster for a gun he doesn’t remember owning.

His breaths are laboured in the cloying air. He can taste moss and steel.

His hands, greasy and rough, unrecognisably so. He wipes his brow and feels the thick smear of oil he leaves behind like a splash of war paint.

His hair too thick, too curly, the thin strip of silver that doesn’t belong there.

Standing, his knees crack and he lets out a snap gasp of surprise.

_Son of a…_

Arthur looks up. On the top shelf, dusty and wriggling with spiders, something else, something he doesn’t recognise.

He clambers onto an upturned green bucket with faded flowers painted all over.

There’s a shallow box, sealed with dirty masking tape. He pulls it down, stares at the top of the lid with apathy, with repugnance.

 _WAIT HERE._ it says in fat purple marker pen.

Arthur traces a finger over the letters through the dust.

One corner of tape is loose, like someone has thumbed it open already, only to give up. He strokes his pinky over the tape, feels the moment it tugs, ready to give.

He frowns at it, unsure if he wants to open it. The gloom of the boiler room, stifling. The hiss of roiling water, of scratching rust.

Through the doorway, the barrels, fat and silent. Menace of men’s demons.

The back of his neck prickles, that animal instinct that cannot be suppressed, that cannot be forgot.

Above his head there’s a clatter, like feet on thundering stairs.

Arthur flinches so violently the box tumbles out of his hands. It crashes lid first to the floor and before he can think what else to do, he runs. Runs hard past the barrels and up the rickety wooden steps, up towards the spilling light above.

On the top step he trips, catching himself with one hand, fingers scraping over the pine floor.

A corner catches, and he feels the bite of the splinter jabbing towards brittle bone.

“Fuck - hello?” he calls out into the empty house.

Blood trickles into his cupped palm. He stares up and down the hallway. Golden sunshine and rosecream walls and the watery sky through the huge tall windows that line the face of the house.

His heart is thudding deeper into his chest, as if it might bury itself into his lungs, disappear into the wet oxygen rasp of his breath.

“Hello?” he calls again, only to be met with silence.

He walks cautiously to the kitchen, the showroom one. The one where nothing really happened, because that’s what the lower pantry was for, where the cook could work out of sight.

Arthur stands at the shiny chrome sink, dripping thick dark blood into the basin.

In front of him, a window overlooking the stables. Empty as the house, now.

The final mare, Heather, breathed her last years ago, after a fifth stillborn foal. She’s buried with her half-birthed baby, down at the fence where the grass is thickest.

Arthur turns on the tap. The water spits and splutters until it runs, murky at first, then clear, ice cold. He holds his index finger under the flow and the blood turns pinkish thin as it slides off his hand.

The collar of his shirt is soaked.

Downstairs, the boiler grumbles.

.

.

There’s a job in Minsk and he thinks he does it well.

The flight, longer than it should have been, even though storm season is over and it’s unthinkable that the world is so vast he can sleep twice on one plane.

He goes to sleep and he wakes up and it’s daytime and his lungs are rags inside the sack of his chest.

Breathes runner hard, electric sparks. The phantom bash of something blunt striking the back of his head. A dullness, a dizziness.

The boiler isn’t working.

.

.

The splinter heals very slowly.

He pulls it out with tweezers; airs it and bandages it and then he gets to work on steaming the wallpaper from the drawing room walls.

It’s thick and eggshell white and he burns his arm just the once when he’s careless.

It takes three days.

.

.

There’s a path out back that leads to nowhere, to the only place he didn’t look for, to the place perhaps he came from.

It’s long, straight, disappearing into the shrubbery that precedes an expansive, unpleasant forest. The trees, gnarled and grumpy.

Arthur puts on a pair of boots with worn soles and a jumper he doesn’t mind getting dirty.

His father came here for the quietude. Now, Arthur comes here for the noise.

It’s loud here. There are birds and insects; snarling badgers and shrieking foxes; the gush of a stream and the snickering of the wind through the treetops.

The house is so lonely now and Arthur can’t bear the way the boiler cries out so shamelessly, like a child’s night terrors come to life, if night were a thing he could unearth in this wintry eternity of day.

He comes here to listen to the crickets, to the whuff-whump of the bats.

He walks down the very long, very straight path, lined with moonstones, half a mile behind Hansel and Gretel.

The mud cushions his heavy steps and the ferns brush their thin fingers against his knees. The branches shelter him as loved ones in a storm.

Arthur walks without breaking pace, walks to the rhythmic thrum of the woods. He walks until it leads him to where he did not know he needed to be.

It peters out, that path, into a clearing. A perfect circle of crispy yellow grass, crunching underfoot.

In the centre, a chair.

Varnished cherry wood, the kind his cousin built. Or was it an uncle?

There are manacles wrapped around its sturdy legs, which is new, which is unwelcome. It is sinister and lonesome, this chair at the end of the road, the end of the world.

He walks straight up to it, as if he had known all along this was where he needed to be.

On the seat, a white card.

He picks it up, scented and heavy duty. A crease of an old fold barely visible.

On the back, a scribble of handwriting he recognises, though it’s not his own.

Maybe it’s his mother’s, like the scent of the paper.

 _GO HOME._ it says, and he hears it in his head, his mother’s coarse voice, the kneaded bread potency of it. The promises it made and kept and broke.

A gunshot, the rippling crack through the trees. Peregrines scream out, soar high into the cloudless sky.

Arthur looks up, but there is nobody there.

He pockets the card. Turns around and walks back home, quicker than he left it.

His heart returning, refilling, refuelling.

She’s waiting for him and he knows that this time, this time he’ll apologise. He’ll tell her, once and for all, what he should have told her years ago.

 _It’s not your fault,_ he should have said, even if it probably was, because she’s his mother and she always loved him even when she couldn’t tell him.

By the time he reaches the edge of the forest, he’s running.

Pine sharp air and _home,_ that home, the big one. His grandmother’s whisky tea smell and the canonball laughter of his grandfather. Lemon cake and vanilla.

He runs on winged feet and his cheeks ache with smiles and he yearns, he needs, he craves.

He vaults over that low yellow gate and up the stony path. That white crested house, that palace amidst plains of wheat.

He runs with both hands outstretched, runs right into the wide black door and shoves hard but it doesn’t give way.

Arthur frowns up at the ornate knocker, the brushed gold lion’s yawn and he grabs the doorhandle. It won’t turn.

“I’m here!” he shouts, rattling the doorknob and smashing the knocker. “I’m home!”

Open palm slaps to the door, the heel of his hand brushing the wood. Nobody answers.

Loneliness swallows him whole.

He looks down at his trembling hands.

Blood oozes down his index finger.

There’s a splinter in the groove of his second knuckle.

.

.

Wake up, sunshine.

He bursts out of the charcoal nightmare and into the midday scourge. His breathing blunt as tyre irons and a hollow gnawing in his gut. He’s running in circles, this day, it doesn’t end. Not ever. It starts again like the turnpike at the end of the stile every time.

His limbs shaking and his heart aching.

.

.

Breaking in is the easy bit.

Mouthfuls of ash and dust, which is mostly dead skin, his sister told him once.

Three black stains in the living room that he can’t scrub away. He stands outside the door that leads to the basement.

He’d been so scared as a child, had scurried past even in broad daylight, just in case the monsters heard.

Now he stares at it, at the sheer wood and ugly doorhandle.

Behind it, something rumbles, earthquake deep.

He thinks it might be the boiler.

.

.

“I do love airports,” she says, fresh faced and gleeful.

 _Mrs Cobb,_ he called her all of once.

Arthur swirls a straw in his martini lemonade, the fat bendy kind that are supposed to be for kids ordering fanta orange.

“You’re just relieved to be out of the house,” he drawls, smirking.

Mal slaps his arm, then takes the last olive from the bowl between them.

“No such thing,” she insists teasingly, though it’s the truth.

This is the first job she’s taken since Phillipa was born.

Dom’s done three already, and would have taken a fourth if Mal hadn’t hounded him for days, lording over him her biological superiority with the crown of motherhood.

 _And which one of us grew a human being inside them last year, Dominick?_ Had been her closing statement.

When Dom’s response led with _Technically we both made Phillipa…_ Arthur, reluctant judge and jury combined, had known it was a lost cause.

Secretly, he’s glad it’s Mal this time, of all times. He’s fairly sure she’s the better dreamer, if by a narrow margin, and this job is going to be tough for a whole host of reasons.

While Mal will probably pick up on his stress easier than her husband would, she’ll also be more useful when it comes to calming him down.

Perhaps she notices even his brief interlude of relief, because her hand slides over the square table to take hold of his fingers.

“So,” she says. Her eyes are dark with conspiracy. “What do you think of him?”

Flashlights in the dark of his secrets. He steels his mask of polite curiosity.

“Who?” he asks coolly.

Mal quirks an unimpressed eyebrow, pursing her lips.

She’s ever so beautiful when she’s being clever.

“You know,” she replies, snake sly, sipping her red wine. “He’s quite handsome.”

Arthur scoffs, swallowing uncomfortably.

“No, nu-uh.”

He shakes his head too vehemently to be genuine. She makes another grab for his hand but he pulls back, prickling uncomfortably all over.

Mal makes a disappointed sound, low in her throat.

“Stop it,” he says, trying to inject some measure of venomous authority. It comes out as an tortured plea at best.

“We’re about to spend three weeks working with him,” she says most unhelpfully.

“Yes, thank you. Let’s not waste time talking about him now, hmm?” Arthur retorts.

Mal’s eyes narrow suspiciously. Her smirk loses some if its joy.

“What aren’t you telling me?” she demands without room for lies.

She’s so beautiful when she’s being clever, and Arthur will be damned if she isn’t the most beautiful creature that ever lived.

“Please,” he says with absolute sincerity. “Let’s talk about someone else.”

Mal drains her wine with a dramatic air of woe.

“Fine,” she sighs deeply. “Don’t let it get in the way of the job.”

Her expression remains soft, though; a little too understanding.

Arthur shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

She doesn’t bring it up again.

.

.

He’s remembered that one wrong, he thinks, when he wakes up in the fox screech dawn, or perhaps dusk.

He looks down at his hands, dusty with chalk. Claps them together and a cloud puffs up into the air before him, volcanic burp of blackboard grit.

.

.

The splinter gets infected.

Arthur wakes up in the bed with the baby blue covers, faded with age and sunlight. His hand is throbbing painfully and when he looks down at it, flat on his chest, there’s a chicken egg of pus and blood.

The veins of his hand seem to glow toxic under his skin. His index finger is shapeless, bulging.

When he moves his hand, the pain shoots past his elbow.

“Oh guh -” he manages, stumbling out of the bed on bare feet, jarring swollen pain all the way to his shoulder.

The ensuite floor is icy. His knees crack when he lands and his face almost touches the water as his vomit splatters in the toilet bowl.

The smell of rotten insides makes him throw up all over again. Chunks in his teeth and bile stinging his throat.

His crying echoes, crocodile child. The gipping bounces over cold tiles in the dark.

He presses his pulsing hand to the floor, grinds his teeth and lets out a wolf howl of agony as sweat crystallises on his brow.

As slowly as he must, as quickly as he dares, Arthur crawls into the shower. The glass panels are warm and the taps squeal in protest before the showerhead issues a jet of freezing water.

Arthur gasps, relieved, and cries some more into the floor on his elbows and knees.

There’s rust in the plug. He puts the infected fingers to his lips, a mocking kiss better. The blister is blood tight, ready to burst.

He runs his teeth over the thinnest stretch of yellowing skin. The veins in his wrist, purple and green.

His hair’s too long, sopping wet in his eyes. He pushes it out of his face and imagines another hand doing it.

Bigger, rougher; tender as a wound.

.

.

When he breaks in, smashing a window to a room he doesn’t remember, he takes extra care to sweep up the glass in a dustpan.

It glitters stardust in the scorch of the light. Hotter through the broken window.

He searches the room, plaster walls and misaligned shelves. Finds a shallow box and pours the shards in.

The lid is nowhere to be found.

.

.

Arthur thinks it’s very possible he’s forgotten something important.

.

.

The boiler eases into the summer, just when hot water gets less important.

The sun is merciless, desert merciless and shrunken.

The painted wood of the house cracks and peels as quickly as the skin on Arthur’s shoulders as he digs over the mud in the garden, upturning fresh soil the way his grandmother taught him.

Outside, the birds are elusive. Swallows curving high in the air, the skylarks higher still.

 _Get out of there, you little mudlark!_ He remembers, though from where, he doesn’t know.

.

.

And then one day, Ben shows up.

.

.

Ben is a sheepdog.

He’s bedraggled and snappy. His coat is tangled and his legs are thin.

His face is so sad, though. Carries loneliness that Arthur empathises with.

He baths Ben in the yard with the hose pipe and Ben keeps trying to drink it, snuffling in surprise when the stream gets him in the face despite Arthur’s best efforts.

“Stop it, mutt!” Arthur laughs and Ben barks.

The crickets scream their thirst. The bees are very tired.

.

.

There were bedtime stories, once.

In the dark, his mom’s voice, before it wasted away.

It’s never nighttime anymore. Arthur’s so fucking tired and he keeps waking up even though he doesn’t sleep.

He wakes up in a bed he spends all day searching for. The sun ever present, Texan heat and Alaskan hours. He can’t sleep and he wakes up in soaked sheets that smell freshly laundered, lavender dry.

Ben sleeps in the yard, or the stable.

Refuses to come into the house, even when it rains, which is never.

Arthur strips the walls and he rips up the pine floorboards his grandma loved so much.

Finds the corpse rot of badgers and possums and something larger, grotesque. It's sunken black and purple, still furry, so he nails the coffin floor shut again.

Opens every window and door to air out the stench and the insects shrink back in terror. There’s a hornet’s nest somewhere, he can hear it something, the drone, musical and ticking.

He stands in the kitchen running his bloody hand under the cold tap.

The boiler grumbles and Arthur frowns at his glancing reflection in the window.

There’s grey in his hair, turning gold in the sun’s rays.

He thinks maybe this would have happened to his mom’s hair, when she grew old.

Only she died before she could live, she died before he was born.

.

.

There are bloodstains in the living room, the south facing parlour that catches the inconsistent sunset that never really happens.

Scorch marks, still warm to the touch.

Arthur’s tried everything. Bleach and soap and scourers; he’s ripped the carpet out and he’s put a new one down. He’s burned the room out with matchsticks.

He goes in there, sometimes, just to look at them. Splatters of scarlet that crust black brown with age.

He doesn’t know how they got here.

He doesn’t want to know.

.

.

Sometimes Arthur looks in the mirror and sees through the grey streaks of his hair and faint lines around his eyes.

It’s not supposed to be like this.

.

.

He’s forgotten someone, or maybe someone has forgotten him.

.

.

He’s waiting for something he must have wanted, once, even if he can’t remember what anymore.

.

.

The glass shards sit in the box on the dining room table, lidless.

Inside, glitters of broken window. A small lilac handkerchief, the initials _JA_ in the corner that he thinks he should know. A purple marker pen.

.

.

The first person he ever really loved, a woman called Kathy Ashbourne.

She was ten years his senior and full of bottled lightning.

Her hair jet black, her eyes electric blue. Her shoulders sloping soft and her voice like honey in a stove.

She moved so gracefully, swinging into the air, her laughter loud and rare.

He keeps a photo of her in his room. Well, the room he keeps waking up in, without ever really sleeping.

She was brash and she was guiltless and she taught him how to fold his tongue around a cherry stem. Then she taught him to fold it around herself.

She was bad, someone told him, but he doesn’t remember that. He just remembers feeling less alone with her shadow beside his own.

He sits on the ground outside the house, Ben in his lap, and watches her dance in sunflower circles through the newly turned soil, cool and damp and full of worms.

The sky, scattered with pepper pink in the dying light of dawn.

Ben howls, and Kathy Ashbourne spins around.

He’s forgotten when she smelled like.

.

.

The splinter scars.

Inflamed, the red slash is almost the length of his finger.

He straps his middle and index fingers together to keep it from bending painfully.

It makes repainting the living room hard. He wears t-shirts with obscure band names on them. They smell of cologne he doesn’t like, no matter how many times he hangs them out to dry in the scorching summer wind.

There’s a battered CD player, cordless, that keeps playing twinkle soft music. Violins and pianos that mean nothing.

They swamp him in sadness, so he turns it off.

Sometimes it kicks in by itself, though. Sometimes he’s outside playing tug of war with Ben and he’ll hear it, like feeling a cold draft beneath bed covers.

A woman’s rattling voice and the swell of an orchestra.

The house has music in its walls that won’t be muted, not by a thousand coats of paint.

.

.

Then, one day, the boiler breaks, flooding the basement with rusty rainwater.

.

.

Arthur’s outside when it happens.

Ben is panting into the parched dirt, his tail flicking at the inquisitive bees that hum and float with summer lethargy.

There’s a great clang from inside the house, iron striking steel, then a roar of gushing water.

“Shit,” Arthur mutters, clambering out of the half dead tomato vines he’s surrounded by.

There’s mud on his jeans and he smells of ripe greenness.

Trails bootprints into the house in his haste. What’s another few steps of crud? This is the condemned sanctuary of yesterday’s heroes.

Here, Arthur is but a squatter with shrouded memories.

He swings open the door of his childhood anxieties and the stench of sewage slaps him across the face.

Outside, thunder, so loud it matches the crash of water that’s slashing at the bottom step of the basement stairs. It’s cold here.

When he clenches his hand, it twinges.

Taking a deep breath, Arthur heads down the stairs with his mouth clamped shut, eyes stinging.

The yellow light hanging from the ceiling swings in an impossible, hurricane blow and when he steps into the water it’s warm, bloody.

A creak of dying wood and the barrel closest splits open. Another fifty gallons of wine spills out, sloshing him purple and stinking.

“For God’s sake!” he cries out, wading through the knee deep mulch of rain and rust and red wine. Bits of barrel float on the rocky surface.

The air is heady with alcohol. The water is pouring out of the boiler room in great spurts, waves and tat and the smell of oxidised iron.

He reaches the doorway and lets out a groan.

There’s a hot copper tap near the base, already steeped in swirling wet.

Arthur grimaces, holding his breath and lowering himself to the ground. His soaked shirt itches uncomfortably; he’s drenched to the armpits.

Crap from the godforsaken shelves spins whirlpool helpless around him.

Above, the tremble of thunder and a ratty howl. Ben’s come inside, finally.

“I’m coming!” Arthur shouts at the ceiling and before he can lose his nerve, he ducks his head under the surface.

Everything is bloody with wine. He fumbles at the base of the boiler. Water in his nose and ears, bubbles of air escaping his contorted mouth too fast.

He can still hear Ben howling, can hear the trail of a woman’s long voice, that G Major tremor, filtering through the water like a siren.

Laughter, a girl’s. Youthful, bubbles in the water, drowning.

His hand grabs the lever and when he wrenches he feels the splinter in his finger nip closer to the bone. No wonder it’s been hurting.

His lungs seize with panic and his legs buck desperately as he heaves into the lever until it gives.

The turn is smooth and the rushing sound slows and when Arthur’s head bursts up out of the basement lake, only the thunder remains. His own breath so loud, rough in his stressed lungs.

Ben’s stopped barking. Arthur sucks in a lungful of plumtree air and gags.

The water’s at his waist. He turns back to the wreckage behind him, but his eye catches a green bucket floating nearby, bobbing in the surface like a buoy.

Inside it, a shallow box, perfectly dry. Purple capital letters that read _WAIT HERE._ which is familiar and ridiculous, he’s _soaked._

Arthur reaches inside, but his hands are more red wine than skin by now. He takes hold of the bucket instead.

The water, it’s still warm, staining; it laps at him, currentless as he strides back towards the stairs. Past the crushed corpse barrels, those demon cages.

There’s even more debris floating here.

A black raincoat and a half deflated football. There are lumps of paper and a tiny folded boat and a dead dog.

Arthur’s heart staggers inside his chest.

The bulk of Ben turns, mangled in the water, his head mostly disappearing into the water.

“Ben, no, Ben,” he mumbles and stumbles, over and over and over.

Casts aside the bucket and it upturns, its contents splashing into the water as he grabs the sheepdog. Heaves him up out of the water.

The white patches of his coat are stained purple and brown. Arthur cradles him, buries his face in the dog’s wet scruff. Huffing his muted cries, smelling wine and dirt and dog.

He cries into the dog’s fur as Ben lolls in his horrified grip. He staggers up the stairs, heaving his sobs and he drops to his knees on the pine floor. It’s thunder and sunshine outside.

Arthur clutches at Ben and begs him to wake up, but of course, he doesn’t.

Ben’s dead.

It’s an option Arthur hasn’t considered before.

He cries until he runs out of the will to make another sound. Until he’s just puffing his chest with air and exhaling it in cumbersome wrenching wheezes.

Still drenched, his hand aching, Arthur fetches a disorganised toolkit from the kitchen and returns to Ben’s sprawled body.

With grunting determination, he pries a pine board up out from its siblings. It clings tight, refusing, but there is no motivator like grief.

Arthur forces it out of place, then another, and another.

His breaths are ragged, salt on his face. The smell of death permeates; cloaks him and carves him a new shape.

Arthur soothes his blistered hands over Ben’s damp cold ears, smoothing his coat and kissing his muzzle.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, again and again and again.

Then he lowers Ben into the pit beneath the floorboards. Furry and purple and black. Replaces the torn boards with painstaking delicacy.

They’re belligerent, aggravated by being disturbed in the name of Arthur’s sorrow.

He stamps them down, one corner that doesn’t slot all the way. There’s a catch near one edge, a flat splinter of wood just begging to cause damage.

He considers sanding it down.

Behind him, the boiler makes an ominous hissing sound.

The face front windows, their painted edge collages, spilling that heavenly glow of thunderous, sunburst splendour into the grandiose hallway.

The thunder, it growls, and Arthur bathes in discoloured sunlight.

His skin is stained like the windows, his clothes are wet.

He trembles violently, wishes he’d sold this shithole years ago.

He wants to go home.

.

.

He thinks, maybe, this isn’t his home.

.

.

The phone rings.

Only, he doesn’t have a phone.

.

.

There’s a job, and he thinks he does it well.

It’s in Lisbon, or Putrajaya, or Nafplio. It’s a long flight. He sleeps and wakes.

He eats breakfast alone and his knee jitters under the table, until his orange juice spills onto his plate, soaking the toast.

His mouth is dry and he’s ready to go back home before he’s even left it behind.

.

.

He walks to the forest, to the cherry wood chair with the chains.

He sits in it, the perfect yellow circle of dead grass.

The dew has left damp trails along his shins and he’s sleepy with the smell of bark and wet pine needles.

Arthur sits in the cherry wood chair and stares out at the looming path, waiting.

Someone told him to go home last time he came here. Someone wants him to go home but he knows, now, he isn’t home. He doesn’t have a home.

The trees snicker together in jest and something moves along the edges, a rabbit. Silky ears and a wriggly tail.

Arthur waits for them to come back, to tell him themselves. He thinks, maybe, he has somewhere he needs to be.

.

.

He sleeps in the chair, remembers it. Stiff back and aching knees. He wipes the crust from the corners of his eyes and he’s awake, soaked in the dawn dew damp.

.

.

He sits a day and a half. He waits.

Dozes off a second time, a third time. Somebody close by, somebody who knows what he’s waiting for, who can tell him where to go.

Dozes off a fourth time.

.

.

Sometimes the CD player, it turns on by itself. She sings to him as a mother might, if he ever had one.

And in the crackle crumbs of static beneath the music, the point where the needle will split, a voice, whispering.

_you’re never going to forgive me you’re never going to forgive me you’re never going to forgive me it’s not love you’re never going to forgive me you’re never going to forgive me you should have told me your name when you had the chance you’re never going to forgive me it’s not love_

.

.

And in the forest, dozing, a little girl cries. Red Riding unhooded. Dry leaf tears that scratch and scrape.

.

.

He wakes up at a gunshot.

It clatters through the treetops and the pigeons scream. The trees shrink with fear and Arthur’s heart races, jackrabbit, squeezing.

The smell of the smoke from the gun. Arthur can feel it in his hand.

He leaps out of the chair and runs into the thickets. Brambles claw at his bare arms and snag his jeans and he runs anyway. Blood trickles down his hands in thin strips of crimson and he slaps the branches out of the way, leg muscles burning.

He heard it, heard the thud-thump of a body, the crack of the gun and the rustle of disturbed ferns.

His chest is tight and he isn’t alone here, someone is here, someone who knows.

There’s a clearing. Bracken and briars. Slows to an almost-halt in the gloom.

His feet tread carefully towards the silhouette in the roots. He licks away the sweat on his upper lip and he shudders, despite the muscling heat of the trees.

It’s a man, bedraggled. He’s wearing an Oxford University sweater and pale jeans. His hair is dark, falling over his face, hiding half of him from sight. Blood and bone smashed apart,the pit of his caved skull. Thick scarlet runs down in a stream, staining the grey sweater.

Arthur reaches down to him, fingers trembling, and his fingers brush against the man’s wrist.

Before he can take hold, something in the pocket of his own jeans vibrates. A tinkling sound, shrill and jabbering.

A phone is ringing.

He holds it in his hand, frowning. A number flashes up, eerie blue. An area code he doesn’t know.

It rings and rings and ice crusts around his spine and Arthur bites down on his tongue, his breaths coming quick and cutting.

He answers, a jab of a thumb before he can chicken out. Holds it away from his ear.

 _“Merry Christmas!”_ a voice says, loud and long. A girl’s voice, not a woman’s. It's giddy and tight with barely held excitement.

She’s laughing; it squeals through Arthur’s head like a bullet.

He can’t breathe. He crowds the phone to his face, precious as kisses.

“What?” he whispers, whimpers, “What?”

 _“Merry Christmas, loser,”_ the girl says. _“You should be here.”_

“Who is this?” he asks, a question that starts somewhere in his soul and rises out of him like a scream.

The girl groans, teasing.

_“Oh ha, ha. Fine. Be that way. I got you a present, and I know you got me one, too. You’re the worst bad big brother in the world.”_

Arthur laughs, and the tears that spill onto his cheeks are unfathomable.

They burn his skin, itch like acid and he drops the phone to the moist ground.

The air in his chest is full of spores. He can’t hold them in, can’t force them out. He clutches at his own throat and the man in the roots is rotting already, he can smell the moss in his hair.

Arthur falls to his knees and pushes his face into the soil, breathes the green and the girl’s voice, tinny out of the phone. Shrieking and wailing, singing through the air.

He breathes and he doesn’t. Grabs fistfuls of the ground as if to tear the very earth apart.

.

.

He wakes up, lavender dry, those goose feather pillows.

He’s home.

.

.

There’s a locked door in this house.

It rattles, bottled storms.

Arthur grips the doorhandle sometimes, feels the vibrations like the hum of piano strings, tough and unyielding.

He presses his ear to the wood and listens to the drilling of sound, the cacophony of warbling noise it emits. Whale songs that linger in his mind for sleepless days.

There are no clocks in this house, but there are guns aplenty.

The door is locked. Stout frame and gold handle.

Arthur stands outside it, eavesdropping on encrypted secrets.

 _Let’s play spies,_ his sister would say.

And Arthur, he’d roll his eyes in exaggerated dismay, secretly glad he had her as an excuse.

He listens to the heartbeat of this house. He breathes with it.

He creeps down into the basement, smells the overripe malbec and the sinewy rot of decay. He gags, blinded. And when a howling scream erupts from the third floor, he knows exactly where to look.

.

.

There are bloodstains in the living room that won’t be washed away.

.

.

The scream is piercing. It is the sound that accompanies a heart shattering into a thousand splinters, a child’s scream and a father’s.

Arthur races up the stairs three at a time.

The shrill tring of torn vocal chords jars him. He trips on the top step, phantom lasso around his ankles.

The locked door is rattled turbulent.

Arthur runs into it, battering ram. All hands and shoulders.

Grunts false promises and bruises his bones.

It caves in under his force. Crumbles in chunks, driftwood on a rocky coast.

Arthur falls into the room on numb feet, missteps and hits the ground on one knee and both hands. The screaming is swallowed in a death choke.

The floor, concrete and sand. It’s hot here, rainforest hot, muggy, sweltering.

Arthur, panting, looks up.

There’s a chair in the middle of the room. It’s dark, battered cherry wood.

In it sits a little girl, no older than ten.

Blonde pigtails and blue eyes rubbed raw with tears and pudgy fists. There’s a cut on her bottom lip, black with blood. Green smudges beneath her eyes.

She’s sniffling, shifting. Her shadow, elongated, bulky. The shadow of a man.

“It’s OK,” Arthur rasps as the girl jags another cry. She’s holding the arms of the chair so tight her body is shaking.

She’s so afraid. There’s a bruise on her head, half-hidden by her bangs.

Who knows how long she has been sitting here?

Arthur shuffles on his knees, ready to prostrate himself beneath her sullen gaze.

“It’s OK,” he says again.

She’s wearing a blue school sweater and a pleated skirt. She leans down to Arthur’s face, and he can smell playground tarmac, scuffed grass and rubber.

“The monster’s here,” she whispers.

A sob rips out of her, the likes of which he has never heard before, a fear he has never known.

He reaches for her and she shrinks back into the seat of the chair.

 _“The monster is here!”_ she shrieks, ear split sandpaper.

Arthur feels it, then. The shadow, her shadow, that is _his._

It falls over him as a cloak, chilled to the marrow of his bones.

He turns, gooseflesh and granite.

The little girl, her terror is his own, it belongs to him; she belongs to him.

The man above him, steel boots and big hands. Arthur gasps and his eyes are closed and he tries to yell but those fingers in his throat, down his throat, scratching his tongue with dirty nails.

He gags, her pigtails torn out in chunks of corn. It drowns him, devours him.

.

.

He opens his eyes, sitting in the basement with the hanging light and the fat barrels full of whisky, or maybe wine and he knows.

He knows now.

He is not alone here.

This is a haunting, and he is only half alive.

.

.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Dom asks.

Arthur has no idea if he means the pink bundle wrapped in an elephant blanket, or the woman cradling her.

“Yes,” he replies anyway,

It’s true, any of it. All of it.

.

.

He cuts up the tomatoes with a knife.

Cautious of the blade, heavy in his hand. Two fingers strapped together.

The gash left behind by the splinter is bone deep, seeps through the bandage every few hours. The smell of the tomatoes is overpowering, their plump flesh and bitty seeds.

The CD player on, clicking through G Major as a woman mourns and croons.

Arthur sings along. Words his mouth remembers, even if his mind doesn’t.

He concentrates on every slice, precisely equal to each that comes before it. Soothing, methodical.

He tips the entire pile into a bowl, drops the knife and chopping board into the sink with a _thud._

Frowning, he looks down to see a box in the sink, under the tap.

It’s shallow, glittering with broken glass.

Without considering it, Arthur picks it up. He takes out the knife and board, drops them forgotten on the sideboard and reaches under the sink for a makeshift lid, snug fit, snagging.

The top of the lid is blank, white. Unsure what to do with it, he puts it on the side, next to a pot of wilting mint.

Returns to the tomatoes in the bowl.

 _Balsamic vinegar,_ he thinks to himself. Heads to the pantry and stops to watch Ben chase a wasp through the window.

He’s gnashing his teeth, tail wagging so violently his whole body moves with it.

In the basement, the boiler is quiet.

.

.

There’s a face he’s forgotten. Meant to keep it in his head but it’s slipped away, ripples in the glassy mirror of a lake’s clear surface.

Hair lighter than his own, eyes blue but only most of the time.

A face of smiles that can’t be trusted, lies that rest ike masks of cling film.

He’s forgotten it. He recalls the very moment of forgetting like a trauma misremembered.

.

.

The splinter heals very slowly.

He pulls it out with tweezers; airs it and bandages it and then he gets to work on steaming the wallpaper from the drawing room walls.

It’s thick and eggshell white and he burns his arm just the once when he’s careless.

It takes three days and underneath the shreds of old anaglypta, there’s a mural of charcoal and chalk.

A face he should recognise, seared with regret. The skip rope of childhood and a word he knows better than any other.

 _DIEF_ it reads, thick black smears that cut apart the patterned plaster beneath.

.

.

Arthur wakes up to daylight, buttersoft in the bedroom.

Footsteps on floorboards.

He sits up in his goose-down bed, that still smells of his mother; of lemon and line.

He creeps out of bed, cautious, the patter of thief steps.

Stares at the door, the toll of its rattle, windchimes in a breeze.

Someone is breathing on the other side.

Arthur reaches silently into the bedside cabinet, withdraws a handgun that doesn’t sit easily in his palm.

The doorhandle turns.

Arthur holds his breath, bites it down inside his mouth like medicine.

The door opens slowly, with all the trepidation Arthur can feel inside himself.

It groans its dispute and Arthur brandishes the gun and looks into the face of this ghostly intruder.

He stares back, aghast, stares back in horror. He stares back at his own face, thin and tired. Hair jet and slicked back and his face, scowling a perfect imitation.

Another Arthur, an _Other_ Arthur.

He’s young, this Other Arthur, and he doesn’t have a gun.

Arthur cocks the trigger and Other Arthur raises both hands in surrender, eyes wide, wide as a frightened little girl.

“Why are you here?” Arthur asks and Other Arthur, this intruder of eternity, he stares back in dismay.

He opens his mouth, closes it, licks his lips.

And then Other Arthur, he says,

“Eames, it’s me.”

Arthur shoots twice, gut first, then the forehead.

Other Arthur crumples into ash, blown away as if he never was.

.

.

Arthur’s forgotten something very important.

.

.

He retraces his steps. The house and the bloodstains and the boiler.

The basement and the window and the sunflowers in the garden.

.

.

There was a job. He did it well.

Then it was over.

.

.

There was a job.

.

.

“We need the girl,” the Extractor says and he agrees, yes, they do.

There is no bond quite like a mother and child.

He’s good with kids. He understands kids. But The Girl, she isn’t just a kid.

She’s a Dead Kid.

He’s not so good with Dead Kids.

He stares at pictures and videos of Bryony Wright and imagines her last moments. Imagines what exactly an eight year old thinks about right before they are beaten to death with a tyre iron.

It sits, coal in his diaphragm.

He doesn’t eat for two days and when the drugs invade his bloodstream his consciousness implodes.

.

.

Bryony Wright sits on the floor of her bedroom, arms around her knees.

She rocks back and forth, as a line of ants she cannot cross scuttle to and fro.

Downstairs, in the basement, a tormented groaning sound.

 _It’s just the boiler,_ she tells herself, like Mama used to say, even after the boiler got fixed.

.

.

Arthur stands on the top step of the basement stairs, staring down at the ankle deep sewage that was once twenty-eight barrels of red wine.

His hands are rough, taped up blisters and a splinter in his finger.

He walks down, step by step by creaking step. Each footfall loud, closer to his last.

The house’s heart is beating.

He splashes into the mulch, gooey and old. He wades through it, barely lifts his feet at all, dragging new lines like snake trails in wet sand.

Lit by yellow, swinging light: a box, dirty and crumpled. He reaches down, picks it up with both hands.

On the lid, smeared purple, barely legible:

_WAIT HERE._

The masking tape, mostly peeled and restuck, comes loose in his fingers. It falls away, limp damp.

He holds his lungs together, crystal breath. Lifts the lid and sand filters out through his fingertips.

Inside, crackling glinting glass. A purple marker pen and a red die and a necklace with a tiny flower.

A lipstick stained handkerchief and a poker chip.

A photograph of two girls, both blonde and pretty and full of life ripped out with cruel haste.

He knows these faces.

He has worn one and he has kissed one goodnight when the nightmares seemed insurmountable.

.

.

Arthur thinks, maybe, he isn’t Arthur at all.

.

.

There was a job.

He thought he’d done it well, but he thinks, maybe, he didn’t even finish it at all.

.

.

Arthur sits in the living room, rolling a red die over and over.

_six two one two four three six five two two one four three five one six two four five six four three_

For a while it looks like code.

It isn’t code, though. It’s chance.

.

.

Arthur breaks into the house and he rips up the floorboards and he floods the basement.

He plants tomatoes where nothing grows and eats them for dinner with an unreasonable amount of balsamic vinegar.

He fixes the boiler and he repaints the drawing room.

He adopts a dog and mourns its passing.

All the while, someone haunts him. Heeds his every move.

A pair of knowing eyes that match his own.

.

.

Arthur forged a little girl called Bryony Wright and then Arthur died in the dream and then Arthur woke up in the dream and then Arthur didn’t wake up at all.

.

.

No, that’s not right.

.

.

Arthur’s not a Forger.

.

.

There’s a mural in the drawing room, charcoal and chalk. _DIEF_ it reads in what he thought was charcoal, but thinks now it might be something else.

.

.

The boiler is broken again.

It gurgles hungry as a beast, eats up sleep like the devilry of Morpheus.

Arthur wakes up, and for the first time, it’s night.

The stars are white hot and glittering through the window. Dappling his bedroom iridescent violet.

There’s a mirror that wasn’t there before. Body length on the back of the door, reflecting the sky  and the curtains and the floor. A step away from that other world, where the sky burns hot and the ghosts rule majestic.

Arthur stands in front of it and takes a good look.

The grey in his hair, it isn’t grey at all. It’s sandy brown, sun streaks. He’s fuller than he remembers being. Rounder shoulders and a heavier stand.

He’s wearing an Oxford University sweater and a pair of sweatpants. He stares at his reflection, alight with distrust, and when the boiler lets out a yelp two floors below, he flinches.

A sound like waves, like water, like the sky.

Someone is on the other side of the door.

A shuffle behind him, the weight of familiar steps.

A small hand slips into his own. He looks down at her face, her pigtails, her unblemished skin. The school uniform and the frilly ankle socks that don’t match.

Bryony smiles at him, and Arthur smiles back a weak look of shame.

On the other side of the mirror, someone is waiting.

Someone with answers to the questions he buried too deep to ask.

Bryony squeezes his fingers and then Bryony is gone, ghost of a machine he left whirring far away.

The door opens very slowly. This time there’s no gun.

There is only a man, tall and willow slender and very, very sad.

He’s standing very still, those dark doe eyes, the stupid jumper and shirt combination he insists counts as _casual._

The man opens his mouth and says,

“Eames, it’s Arthur.”

He opens his mouth and says,

“Eames, I’m here to take you home.”

.

.

There was a job, a hundred thousand years ago.

Arthur, the _real_ Arthur. Tears streaming down his red flushed face. Jagged crying, the ugly kind that rips through disappointment and delves directly into devastation, catastrophe in its fingerprints.

Every word has too many syllables.

_You-ou ca-an’t l-love-ve me-e-e if-f y-you-ou d-don-n’t t-t-trus-st m-m-me-e._

The real Arthur, devastated by an accidental strike.

_You’re never going to forgive me, are you?_

.

.

There was a job.

He forged a little girl called Bryony Wright and then he died in the dream and then he woke up in the dream and then he didn’t wake up at all.

.

.

He stands in the bedroom, lit only by the stars. He clenches his teeth, feels the tickle of his bones beneath his unruly skin.

He stares at this graceful intruder, at his caution and his rage.

He’s forgotten something important, he knows that know.

He’s forgotten himself.

.

.

There was a job.

Eames forged a little girl called Bryony Wright and then Eames died in the dream and then Eames woke up in the dream and then Eames didn’t wake up at all.

.

.

Eames, standing in the clearing of the forest, dead grass and chains and a cherry wood chair.

The sun burns his forehead and he stares up into the fluff of the clouds above.

“Hello?” he asks the sky, and tears sting his eyes. This is a world too large, a world that is not his own.

He presses his hands to his face, smoothes out the creases in his skin. His clothes are too big for him. He's alone and he’s surrounded.

 _Scrambled eggs,_ he thinks, and then he can’t remember why.

There’s a path that leads into the thickets of the forest, leads out to the plains all the way to a white Georgian house. Home, he thinks, maybe.

He walks barefoot through the coppice and into the growth beyond.

.

.

A house with front facing windows and a rotting basement; a broken boiler churning.

A bedroom full of starlight.

“How did you get here?” Eames asks in an American twang that tastes stale.

Arthur hasn’t moved, rabbit splashed by headlights.

“It took a long time,” he says with a nervous frown, a schoolboy’s frown.

“But you-”

“I know,” Arthur interrupts and Eames, he sees him, the realness of him.

Arthur, in his jumper shirt combo that is so _non-casual_ and his hair all tidied back and his fist clenched tight around what Eames knows is a red die, even if he doesn’t know what number it would land on if he threw it.

He’s still wearing half of Arthur’s features like ripped clothes and he sinks a little into the ground.

His vision blurs but Arthur remains sharp and clear as one of his best suits.

“You’ve been waiting for a long time,” Arthur says and he isn’t just talking about the dream, this rotting churning dream that is boundless and isolated and decaying all around them.

Then he moves his fist in a tilted, jabbing motion. From it flies a tiny red cube. It clatters between them, metallic and ringing.

It lands on eight.

Eames chokes on a laugh and when he raises his trembling hands to his face, he feels the trickle of stubble.

He gasps into his sweaty palms, tears leaking through his fingers and he flinches when two solid hands take hold of his wrists.

He refuses their gentle tugging, snuffles wetly into his hands, loud and childlike. A pair of dry lips press against his knuckles, and against his forehead.

Arthur smoothes his hands through Eames’ hair and fistfuls of black loosen under his touch. Come away in chunks quickly replaced with muddy corn tufts.

“That’s better,” Arthur says, which Eames assumes means he looks less like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, now.

He rubs his hands over his face and before he can hide it again, Arthur cups his cheeks in both hands and kisses him.

Beneath their feet, the boiler grinds into action. A sob bursts out of Eames’ mouth and into Arthur’s. He can feel the bones in his face misaligning against his will.

“She was so afraid,” he cries into the chasm and Arthur holds steadfast to his kisses.

“No, Eames, no, don’t do this.”

Eames’ face, hot, covered in kisses.

Arthur’s hands all over his head and neck and arms.

“Come back, come back, come back,” Arthur says, which isn’t fair, that’s Eames’ line.

“You left,” he chokes spitefully and Arthur kisses him into silence with a wet tongue barbed for insults.

“I came back,” he says.

Eames grips creases into Arthur’s cashmere jumper and Arthur doesn’t bat an eyelid.

He pushes his forehead against Eames’. Bone bruise deep. His eyes are dark and his mouth is twisted. Eames stares back, shivering in the starshine.

“You love me,” Arthur says, with all the confidence he never carried before.

Eames crumples, butter soft.

“Yes, I do,” he promises.

Arthur kisses him again, softer, a press of worried mouths bumping against one another in the descant of darkness.

“You forgot everything except me,” he says, like it’s a surprise.

Eames tucks his face into Arthur’s cheek.

“You love me,” he says instead of answering, or maybe that _is_ the answer.

The house creaks around them.

Outside, a dog barks gruffly to the solemn moon.

“Come back with me?” Arthur asks.

Eames strokes the lines of his ever familiar face, wet clay in a bronze mould.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says.

Arthur kisses like he apologises, tender rosebuds hidden among thorns.

Eames closes his eyes, tastes him, coffee and hazelnut.

Doesn’t feel the quick snap of the bullet when it cracks through his temple.

.

.

There was a job and he did it well, did it too well.

.

.

“I can’t do this again, Eames,” Arthur said, two months after the Fischer Job. As if the baggage they carried was too much of a burden.

“It isn’t love, Eames,” Arthur said, not once, but twice.

He left and then he came back.

.

.

(He traced the scars over his back, the shape of them, tattooed into his rough skin. He kissed them and soothed them and he said, _Never again.)_

.

.

Eames tastes the collapse of the dream in the air. The polluted fumes of toxic somnacin, that sherbet fizz, air in the syringe.

Bryony Wright, screaming out of his mouth, contorted. Her mother's anguish.

And the last thing he thinks, of course, remains.

.

.

 _Arthur,_ he thinks, as powerful as the sea of these dead dreams.

.

.

Eames wakes up, bleary. The blip-screech of hospitals. The smell of scrubs and gloves.

His mouth is salty dry and his head is thick with fog.

Arthur is there.

He’s lying next to him, the PASIV still hooked between them.

His eyes are dark, his hair is black. There are bruises so deep inside his cheeks.

Reaches a careful hand to rest it on Eames’ cheekbone, and Eames closes his eyes again under that benevolent touch. A face close to his own, sour breath and soft mouth.

Arthur kisses him, and Eames kisses back.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur whispers into his mouth.

Eames opens his eyes, their noses nudging together. Solid weight on a solid bed and it’s evening, spider grey and blushing pink. He pulls the needle out of his arm and Arthur does the same with his own.

“Your totem’s gone,” Arthur says, mouth a wobble of worry.

Eames almost laughs. He drops the IV line in the open PASIV, already forgotten and curls closer into the heat of this intruder in his bed.

Arthur arches around him, an animal instinct he never forgot, and neither did Eames.

“I trust you,” Eames says quietly.

He keeps his hand curved around Arthur’s cheek as he drifts, lethargic leisure, into a dreamless sleep.

.

.


End file.
